United Kingdom: the government study that examined 84 ritual-abuse allegations — and what it actually found
Request a correction or replyRecord class
Context only
Evidence status
Official finding
Authority role
the UK Department of Health, commissioning an independent academic study
Organization
UK Department of Health
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
The finding matters precisely because it is nuanced: ritual was real in a small number of cases, but as a mechanism of control rather than as worship — which is close to how this corpus defines the criterion, arrived at independently by a government study.
- Violent occult ideology or sacrifice
- Institutional obedience or isolation
Evidence structure
Proceedings
1994-01-01 · published findings
United Kingdom — Department of Health commissioned study (Prof. Jean La Fontaine). Professor Jean La Fontaine examined eighty-four alleged cases of ritual or satanic abuse drawn from police, social-services and NSPCC records for 1988 to 1991, together with interviews. Three of the eighty-four were substantiated as involving genuine organised abuse — and none of those three met the satanic or devil-worship criterion. Where ritual elements were present, the study found them to be instruments of control and intimidation, with a sexual motive underlying the abuse rather than religious worship.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- ritual elements found, where they existed at all, to be instruments of control and intimidation rather than religious worship
Cited record
Sources
- official commission finding government study Jean La Fontaine, 'The Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Sexual Abuse' (UK Department of Health, 1994) — study summary and findings.
The commissioned study's own findings on the 84 examined cases.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://saff.nfshost.com/fontaine.htm Corpus classification: official-commission-finding; evidentiary role: government-study. SHA-256 68ba324ba6b9f87cee118a92278d206861a11dd63130535e920ae2af1573392a
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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